Dispatch from AGU: With Apologies to Mark Twain

At Monday’s poster session, Janet Swim presented the results of a survey about climate change attitudes. Swim, a Professor of Social Psychology at Penn State, was interested in whether people knew how other people felt about climate change.

The survey asked people to categorize themselves on a by-now standard six-category scale, ranging from “very concerned” to “nonbeliever”, and then asked them to estimate the distribution among the general public.

As expected, though people tended to be concerned, they tended to think the public was evenly divided.

Why the error? Were people who watched the news affected by a false balance in news coverage?

Not really. Those who watched the news tended to be more accurate in their assessment of the population, with the exception of those who watch Fox News.

Was it because people don’t see a lot of action at the personal level in response to climate change?

Maybe so. According to the survey, the less people see others adjusting their lives because of climate change, the more they assume everyone else is not concerned, either.

Meanwhile, concerned people generally had a personal excuse for not altering their own behavior.

Furthermore, the less action they saw other people taking,including something as simple as talking to friends about the issue, the less likely they were to do or say anything themselves, perhaps because they didn’t want to stand out in a crowd.

Mark Twain famously said, “Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it.” Well, nobody talks about the climate, and nobody does anything about it, either.

12 Responses

“Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it.”

I can’t find it now, but I recall some science-fiction story in which technology for weather control became relatively inexpensive, and the protagonist worked for the weather police, charged with catching people who made unauthorized changes to weather, often causing bad side-effects on others.

The punchline of the story was of course:
“Everybody does something about the weather, but nobbody ever talks about it.”

Interesting psychobabble here. I can see why social psychology is not a science. But regardless, it is at least heartening to see how people can live with the wonderful and necessary situation we have today in the US with no action about anthropogenic climate change, just lots of hot air about what we should be doing and hand wringing about extreme storms and an 11.1 millimeters of sea level rise over 20 years being a disaster. Glad you enjoying Frisco, alas this year for the first time in many decades, I will not be there. But I doubt the crowd at the Empress of China gala will miss me, ;-{)

The New York average sea level rose 130mm from 1980 to 2009 and the rate of rise is almost twice what it was 1950 to 1979. North Carolina is undergoing a similar acceleration in sea-level rise. The North Carolina Senate found a way to stop the steady increase in the rate. They passed a bill banning the use of exponential extrapolation to predict sea-level rise.

Efforts like those of the Senators make it easier for people to live with the inaction of the US regarding climate change.

You will also note that global sea level rise is not linear, its’ rate goes up and down over time, including the last 20 years. And of course regional variations have most to do with what the earth’s crust is doing along the shoreline, some areas subside at different rates, and some areas rise. So to point to the East Coast as some human CO2 caused disaster, is far from reality.

Dr. J, your link to the Tucson Citizen is not close to the “full scientific story”.

They miss a simple explanation: sediment compaction and subsidence from varying rates of groundwater withdrawal.

Salenger’s paper takes great pains to eliminate subsidence as a possible explanation for the rising sea level data. She notes that data from locations more susceptible to subsidence is statistically the same to that from less susceptible locations and verified using GPS systems that nonlinear land motions were not affecting the results.

Jonathan DuHamel is using smoke and mirrors to keep people form taking the paper seriously. At best he wrote a rebuttal without reading the paper, at worst he intentionally lied about why it is wrong. Are you sure you want to refer people to misinformation like that?

Dr. N-G, you opined: “Well, nobody talks about the climate, and nobody does anything about it, either.”

This brings to mind the maxims, “Look before you leap,” and “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

Based on a 95% confidence interval of predictions from available models, say over the next 50 years, exactly what do you recommend that we should do? Firstly, in public policy (other than funding more investigations to provide better quality, ongoing data), and second, in personal behaviors?

Is there quantitative evidence that *anything* we could do would amount to more than a drop in the proverbial bucket when it comes to affecting climate? Might it not be a much wiser use of public and private funds to invest in land tracts for conservation, provide incentives for good governance in the hope that nations at risk from weather fluctuations will act, encourage local and regional ecological improvements, and similar measures that would make pragmatic sense no matter what the news du jour says about climate trends?

M4- My policy priority would be funding/incentives for alternative energy research, including nuclear-based alternatives. We need good, cost-effective, scalable energy alternatives before we can hope to decarbonize the economy. I’d fund it with a small carbon tax, so that the problem pays for the solution. We can’t just legislate reductions in emissions and expect them to happen. This would be wise even without climate change, because fossil fuels are going to get more and more expensive and the nation that develops the most cost-effective alternative technology wins.

As for personal action, it’s sort of like recycling. One person recycling plastic bags accomplishes nothing, but everyone recycling accomplishes a great deal.

Investing in land tracts for conservation might be the worst possible response to climate change. As the climate gets warmer, and precipitation patterns change, species are stuck in those isolated tracts of land we’ve preserved for them while the climate they can thrive in has moved somewhere else.

Sea levels have been rising since the last Ice Age ended.
Always amazing how these “Scientists” can Hypothesis about Climate change when at best they can only pull data from the past 500 years.
This Planet clocks in at around 3.5 –4 Billion years of age,,,So you can bet that 500 years of data can certainly NOT give you an accurate picture of what this Planet is doing.

These Clowns could obtain 1 million years of past weather data and still not even come close to what the Planet is going thru.

There was a story about a year ago which pointed out how the Chicken Little crowd was cherry picking weather data to prop up their assertion of “Man Made Climate Change” happening before our eyes,,,,its amazing what people will say or do to get the spotlight or some Govt Grant to study Cow Farts on the ozone layer.

The scientists that are preaching the loudest about climate change need to publically discuss the effect of cosmic rays on upper atmosphere cloud formation. More clouds mean more cooling. It seems to be relatively new and could derail the whole APG doomsday idea.

You mention that:Sea levels have been rising since the last Ice Age ended.
Always amazing how these “Scientists” can Hypothesis about Climate change when at best they can only pull data from the past 500 years.

You are certain that sea level has been rising for the last 10,000 years, but also certain that we cannot know what sea level was doing before 1512?

Here is what one team found when investigating sea level rise over the last 2000 years. Note that the rise did not start until 1700 or so.